As an individual who does not use Internet Explorer as their primary browser, there is a great feature that you may never notice that allows you to easily copy files to and from a document library: the Open in Windows Explorer link. In browsers such as Chrome or Firefox this link may not appear.

I know this isn’t a major groundbreaking feature, but it’s really easy to overlook and it’s worth knowing about, especially when you need to create a local copy of a full document library. In this quick blog we’ll go over how to access this feature in both SharePoint 2007 and 2010.

First, make sure you are in Internet Explorer. These options may not show in other browsers.

In SharePoint 2007, browse to the document library you would like to access then select Actions > Open with Windows Explorer.

In SharePoint 2010, browse to the document library you would like to access then select Library Tools > Library > Open with Explorer from the ribbon.